The present invention relates to the technique of analyzing a plurality of inspection recipes set in a defect inspection apparatus.
A defect inspection apparatus which optically or electronically inspects products made of thin film such as semiconductor integrated circuits, magnetic heads and flat panel displays requires to set inspection recipes (inspection conditions) for performing optical or electronic processing such as parameters including laser intensity, contrast of image and threshold for image processing in accordance with deposition condition, wiring material and the like properly.
In this respect, JP-A-2005-17159 discloses the technique that a plurality of inspection recipes are prepared previously to perform defect inspection in accordance with the plurality of inspection recipes, so that a large number of obtained defect coordinates are compared with one another among the inspection recipes to judge that defects having near defect coordinates are the same defects so as to reduce the number of defects, so that the reduced defects can be observed by a defect review apparatus to thereby select suitable inspection recipes.
In the technique disclosed in JP-A-2005-17159, it is judged that the defects having near defect coordinates are the same defects to reduce the number of defects and the reduced defects are observed by the defect review apparatus, although a recent defect inspection apparatus produces thousands of or tens of thousands of defect coordinates at one inspection and accordingly it takes time and is difficult to observe all of these defects by the defect review apparatus.